Whispering-gallery-bottle microcavities: the three-dimensional etalon

In a tapered optical fiber there exist localized light structures that, in analogy to the magnetic bottles used in plasma fusion, can be called whispering-gallery bottles (WGBs). These essentially three-dimensional structures are formed by the spiral rays that experience total internal reflection at the fiber surface and that also bounce along the fiber axis in response to reflection from the regions of tapering. It is shown that the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin quantization rules for the strongly prolate WGBs can be inversed exactly, thus determining the cavity shape from its spectrum. The approximation considered allows one to find the shape of the etalon bottle, which, similar to the one-dimensional Fabry-Perot etalon, contains an unlimited number of equally spaced wave-number eigenvalues. The problem of determining such a non-one-dimensional cavity is not trivial, because such a cavity does not exist among the uniformly filled cavities such as rectangular boxes, cylinders, and spheroids that allow separation of variables. The etalon cavity corresponds to the fiber radius variation rho(z) = rho(0)\cos(Deltakz)\, where Deltak is the wave-number spacing. The latter result is in excellent agreement with ray-dynamics numerical modeling. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.